Reddit’s Take On Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Boastful, Brilliant Or Both?

The unpredictability of the Brexit vote has led to some spirited financial debates on social media in the past week. One Reddit discussion focused on Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In addition to being a best-selling author, the Lebanese-American statistician is also a former derivatives trader and hedge fund manager.

After reading Taleb’s book “Antifragile,” which focuses on uncertainty, probability, human error and risk, a Reddit poster asked others for opinions of Taleb and his viewpoints on investing.

Despite his commercial success, many posters were not impressed by Taleb’s ideas or his boastful tone.

The top voted comment describes Taleb as “a very frustrated pseudo-academic who is very good at making the obvious (hedge, barbell) sound difficult and important.”

Another poster said that Taleb’s book “Black Swan” was full of “’no shit’ concepts which anyone applying some basic critical thinking [can] understand.”

One poster said that Taleb’s “narcissism was so thick I had to put his book down.” The post sparked a thoughtful discussion about how many of the smartest people in the world are also very humble. The consensus was…

Want to learn more about how to profit off the stock market? Or maybe you just want to be able to look sophisticated in front of your coworkers when they ask you what you are reading on your Kindle, and you’d prefer to tell them “Oh, I’m just reading a book about stock market analysis,” rather than the usual “Oh, I’m just looking at pics of my ex-girlfriend on Facebook.” For these reasons and more, check out my book, Beating Wall Street with Common Sense. I don’t have a degree in finance; I have a degree in neuroscience. You don’t have to predict what stocks will do if you can predict what traders will do and be one step ahead of them. I made a 400% return in the stock market over five years using only basic principles of psychology and common sense. Beating Wall Street with Common Senseis now available on Amazon, and tradingcommonsense.com is always available on your local internet!